Our guest speaker for our meeting on October 9 was Lori Johnson from Anglin Public Relations. She is a senior account executive and has been working with Anglin for 7 years. Johnson graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 2011 with a Bachelor’s degree in Communications. She also received her Master’s in Strategic Communications.

Anglin PR is a full-service PR agency that works with people with big ideas. Anglin is located in Oklahoma City where they provide many different services such as PR counseling, social media, media relations, grassroots PR, materials production and market research. One of the big things that Johnson does for Anglin PR is create media pitches.

Johnson’s presentation covered the rights and wrongs of media pitches and gave tips on creating and drafting the perfect pitch. One piece of advice that she gave our members was to add visuals to pitches. This is “essential to catching the eye of reporters” and helps them better understand the newsworthy piece.

Johnson stated that there are four important pieces to a “Perfect Pitch”:

1. It has to be Newsworthy

2. The pitch must be customized

3. The pitch must be concise and straight to the point

4. It has to be visually interesting

We had another guest speaker, John Schmeltzer, accompany Lori Johnson in her presentation. Schmeltzer is our very own Journalism professor, and he gave us the journalist insight on some of the media pitches that Johnson discussed during her presentation.

Schmeltzer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who held numerous positions during his 35-year career at the Chicago Tribune, from political writer to assistant business editor. At the end of Johnson’s presentation, both Johnson and Schmeltzer analyzed media pitches to help our members understand the correct way to draft media pitches.

Hearing from both a PR professional and a professional Journalist was an amazing experience for our chapter! As our chapter learned more about media pitching, we will remember that at the end of the day, it is important to be human when giving a pitch.